Flashout 3D Amounts to an Uninspired, Unoriginal Wipeout Clone

Although it looks promising, Flashout is nothing special.

In my experience, most racing games that manage to excel on touchscreen-only platforms are of the 2D variety. That's not because developers are avoiding 3D racers, it's just that these attempts tend to not be all that great. Flashout 3D looks to be a promising, if somewhat unoriginal attempt to bring a Wipeout-style racer to iPhone and iPad. Unfortunately, the thing it does best is ape from Wipeout, and beyond that it doesn't manage to do anything new or to completely nail the whole racing thing.

Immediately upon opening the game up, it doesn't make the best of impressions. The menus aren't as intuitive as they could be, and the text and arrows used on the How to Play screen look downright awful. Once you're into your first race, the thing that sticks out most is not the quality of the graphics (nice, but never anything that will make you think, "I can't believe I'm playing this on my phone/tablet!"), but the sound effects. At first they are seemingly missing -- your ship has apparently been equipped with a hell of a muffler, because it produces so little noise I had to mute the music to even be sure it was there. Weapons also do have sound effects, though based purely on the way they sound, I'd peg their lethality as falling somewhere between a Nerf gun and a bag filled with leaves. Somehow, that is an improvement over collisions, which yield no sound whatsoever no matter how fast you're going when you slam into a wall or another racer.

The subdued engine noise contributes to what is a pretty mediocre sense of speed. Part of Wipeout's appeal -- and make no mistake, Flashout is blatantly attempting to be Wipeout for mobiles -- is the rush you get from how fast you're racing. That's missing from here, though it does do a decent job of nailing the Wipeout look itself, from the angular ship designs to the futuristic cityscapes surrounding the tracks. Along with the controls being tolerable once you find what works for you (I favored a virtual analog stick with the sensitivity turned down slightly to accelerometer controls), this is all the game can claim to have going for it.

That's because it does nothing to take a step beyond being a Wipeout impression, and the racing isn't strong enough to compensate for that; if it were, I'd be more okay with the lack of interesting ideas. There are no unique modes (you're either racing against the AI or doing time trials), no unique weapons (only a machine gun and rockets? really?), and no unique power-ups (boost, autopilot). Four races into the main campaign and already I was repeating a track I had already played, and it wasn't even reversed. By that point I had also already seen everything that the next few hours that I continued to play would offer up. There were still some new tracks and their various shortcuts to check out, but, beyond that there, wasn't a single new mechanic or idea that expands on what's seen in your first race.

There are a variety of small gripes I have which, on their own, aren't game-breakers. Combined, they begin to make it look as if developer Jujubee didn't fully think everything through. For instance, there's no way to easily tell opponents apart or see what place they're in. On the last leg of a three-race tournament, you may only need to ensure you finish ahead of a particular competitor. Without standings or name plates above racers, there's no way to know for sure where you stand and whether any risk-taking is needed. Not that there is much wiggle room to allow this; strategic decisions like the ability in Wipeout to absorb an item to regain health are nowhere to be seen.

The lack of a mini-map is also a head-scratcher. You're told what position you're in, but without a mini-map, it's impossible to know how far ahead or behind other racers are. Are they just around the corner, or much further ahead? Not knowing makes it difficult to know whether you're better off taking a shortcut, which, for some reason, requires shooting down a barricade on each lap, or saving one of those overpowered rockets in the hopes of catching up and slowing the AI down with it. No mini-map also means my suspicions of Mario Kart-style rubber-band AI have to go untested, because it's not like you're told how much you won or lost by after a race.

Speaking of which, another suspicion I had was that the penalty for collisions was almost nonexistent. Aside from the lack of any noise when one happens, you don't take any damage when you make contact with a wall; you're slowed down a bit and that's all. Considering that acceleration is handled automatically, I tested out what would happen when I let the game play itself. I completed a time trial race in 3:51 and then started it up again and put my iPad down. Without touching anything, "I" finished in 4:40. 49 seconds is a significant disparity, but it's the sort you expect to see between a really good player and a bad player, not a good player and no player whatsoever.

With Flashout, I wasn't expecting a game as good as Wipeout 2048, the Vita title released earlier this year. After all, this is only a $2 App Store game. I was, however, hoping for a decent racing game in the Wipeout mold for me to take on the go -- as much as I like 2048, it's my iPhone that goes with me everywhere, not my Vita. As it turns out, Flashout only has the trappings of a Wipeout game: It has the look, but none of the substance.